COMRADE K​
An entertainment for the Atom Age

K is the perfect spy – talented, charming and working for the Soviets at the apex of MI6. Hero, traitor … or just a guy looking forward to a whisky and soda at the day's end?

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Comrade K playfully fictionalises the career of Kim Philby, reimagining events covered by John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy from the perspective of the Philby character. In doing so, it follows other recent novels that reinterpret well-known texts in the light of today’s values, including Percival Everett’s James and Kamel Daoud’s The Mersault Investigation.

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Seen through his own eyes, Philby was an English patriot who believed that the British Empire as the great evil of his times. He spied for the Soviet Union as the fastest way to destroy it.

 

Does that make him hero or traitor?

 

Probably, he was neither. He was a deeply flawed man who thought that he was serving his country’s best interests, and he could rationalise causing hundreds of deaths because he worked toward a higher good. Che Guevara and Simón Bolívar felt the same way, and it’s what Guy Fawkes dreamed of. Philby was also an unreliable narrator and sometimes an out-and-out liar.

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This is his story, told with one eyebrow raised and a sense that history isn’t always what we think it is.

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Longlisted, Retreat West First Chapter Competition